The Sea Hath Its Pearls
The sea hath its pearls,The heaven hath its stars;But my heart, my heart,My heart hath its love.
Great are the sea and the heaven;Yet greater is my heart,And fairer than pearls and starsFlashes and beams my love.
Thou little, youthful maiden,Come unto my great heart;My heart, and the sea, and the heavenAre melting away with love!
About this text
The Sea Hath Its Pearls is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Project Gutenberg ebook #1365; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Sea Hath Its Pearls, in A Psalm of Life, and Other Poems (1839–1882), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1365, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/longfellow-poems/the-sea-hath-its-pearls.html, id L26181.
Form and metre
The Sea Hath Its Pearls is 12 lines in 3 stanzas of 4 lines each. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| The sea hath its pearls, | 5 | ····· |
| The heaven hath its stars; | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| But my heart, my heart, | 5 | ····· |
| My heart hath its love. | 5 | ····· |
| Great are the sea and the heaven; | 8 | ······/˘ |
| Yet greater is my heart, | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| And fairer than pearls and stars | 7 | ·/˘···· |
| Flashes and beams my love. | 6 | /˘···· |
| Thou little, youthful maiden, | 7 | ·/˘/˘/˘ |
| Come unto my great heart; | 6 | ······ |
| My heart, and the sea, and the heaven | 9 | ·······/˘ |
| Are melting away with love! | 7 | ·/˘˘/·· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.